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Discover Mid-America — April 2007

Internet Search Tools 101: Part I

The Internet can be a great research tool for dealers, but only if they know how to make optimal use of Internet search technologies to ferret out the information they need. Even those comfortable with Internet search tools may be stuck in the commercial "Google" rut rather than using the added capacities both within and beyond Google.

Your search is only as good as your engine

For serious research on antiques, there's Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). It returns actual articles in academic and professional journals, some of which can be found in full text form and free of charge for the printing. (There are also some pay-per-view databases tied into Google Scholar, but chances are you'll find what you need in the free results.)

Google's image library can also be helpful; you can get to this feature on the regular Google search page by clicking on the "images" link just above the search box. If you want to know what, for example, the work of a particular furniture maker looks like, you can search the archives of actual online photos. What's more, clicking on an individual image will bring you to the original web page on which that item appeared.

Powerful metasearch engines combine results from several individual engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. One of my favorites is Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com), whose slogan is "all results, no mess." Another longtime favorite metasearch engine is Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) .The Invisible Web (http://library.rider.edu/scholarly/rlackie/Invisible/Inv_Web.html) is so called because the pages returned are embedded in databases or in a document format that regular search engines — even Google — can't find.

The web address above allows you to search directories and portals, the invisible or deep web (e.g., article databases), and search engines both general and specialized.

Your search is only as good as your search terms

Finding search engines capable of returning useful results in antiques and collectibles research is only half the battle. Many folks too readily jump to the conclusion that what they have "must be" rare or prototypic when, in 98% of such cases, the user has simply failed to construct a competent search query.

To demonstrate how that's done, we're going to use a real-time search on Google for an item in my home that I've not previously researched. I have a small tripod-base table stamped "L. HITCHCOCK, HITCHCOCK-VILLE, CONN. WARRANTED" in gold stencil under the tabletop.

Now, if we simply type in the search box, the phrase Hitchcock table, the likelihood is low that we'll get what we want. The search engine will return every page that has both the name Hitchcock and the word table. The two words may be widely separated on the web pages and may have little or nothing to do with one another. So to reduce irrelevancy and assure that we keep the two keywords together in our "hits," we'll place quotation marks around them: "Hitchcock table"

My Lambert Hitchcock table has a maple top with trademark Hitchcock stenciling. Is it old or is it new? The mark will tell! (Read on.)

The first two items listed when we search under the quoted phrase are ads for movies (perhaps a Hitchcock table makes a cameo appearance!), and there are an awful lot of eBay listings after that. We can screen the eBay listings out — and while we're at it, let's get rid of those pesky movie listings, too. We can do that by constructing the search with a minus sign in front of the terms we want to exclude: "Hitchcock table" -eBay, -movies

Click! Ah, that's better. Now we have quick access to some interesting facts. The "L" in Hitchcock stands for Lambert. The full name of the company is "The Hitchcock Chair Company." Its favored woods were maple and cherry — and the company was founded in 1826. Woo-hoo!

Does that mean I have a 19th century table? Well, let's just hold our horses....

My Hitchcock table's tripod base is accented with gilded bands. Maple and cherry were the favored woods in Hitchcock furniture, and although the tabletop is evidently maple, it's hard for me, furniture novice that I am, to tell whether the base is maple or some other secondary wood.

We also happen upon a news article, published in the Hartford Courant, discussing the 2006 closing of the Hitchcock Chair Company, which was located in Riverton, CT, a place so identified with the company that it was called "Hitchcocksville" until the 1860s. Hmmm... closed as late as 2006.

To find out whether the mark is any clue to the age, we'll type into the search box, again in quotes, "Hitchcock Chair Company." The company web site is still up, the first thing listed in the search results, but it's only a shell page since the company's closing. Hitting the "Back" button, we find in the list an article in AntiqueWeek (4/28/06 issue), where we learn of Hitchcock's mortise-and-tenon construction and that many of the furniture parts were hand-turned and shaped.

Then, bingo! We find an article in Fred Taylor's column, "Common Sense Antiques," from the June 2006 edition of the antiques trade journal Discover Mid-America. As it turns out, Hitchcock furniture made since 1946 has an anomaly in the stenciling: the two "N's in CONN. are printed backwards! Also, there's a registered mark at the end of the stencil string. This wouldn't have been there, of course, in the 1830s when, according to Taylor's article, for a brief time the backward "N's" also appeared — a probable result of worker illiteracy in that era.

I flip my table over again, and guess what? Yep, made after 1946. It may still be well constructed and collectible, but an antique it ain't. Were I a dealer unfamiliar with Hitchcock furniture, it would have been worth the Internet research time (about 20 minutes) to avoid mistakenly attributing the table to the 19th century. Besides, I learned a lot from the information chase — and there's no putting a price tag on that!

Here's the underside of my table, with the stenciled mark for the Hitchcock Chair Company. The reverse N's on the abbreviated Connecticut, coupled with the registered symbol, peg this table to a post 1946 construction by a company in business since the early 19th century.

(Next month, more about constructing a competent search query!)

Peggy Whiteneck is a writer and collector living in East Randolph, VT. If you would like to suggest a topic she can address in her column, email her at allwrite@sover.net.

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